Wednesday, February 01, 2017

So, I've been a long time Perl user since the 1990s. I rarely used it on job, but my only (widely?) used open source contribution is an application written in Perl 5: AFT (It is on github and is also available to any Ubuntu based distro by typing "sudo apt install aft".

It looks very interesting. In particular, I am excited about its concurrency/parallel support (why is it that so few languages come with this baked in?). The FFI looks usable (I've managed to get Perl 6 working with libusb pretty quickly).

But why bother?

I've always liked the language design approach of Perl. The maximal syntax approach is dense but can have some appeal. In particular, it seems to avoid the (overbearing) library approach that other languages take. This is a strength shared by Haskell and (yes) C++1x (C++11, C++14, etc).

For me, a couple of lines of well written code always wins over the "I must dive into a hierarchy of libraries and calls". You just need to avoid making the couple of lines too dense.

This is the thing... in C++ and Perl I tend to avoid libraries if I can. Externally dependencies are more subject to code rot. AFT still runs (on almost any Perl distro) in part due to lack of dependencies on libraries that may be "abandoned" or improperly upgraded (to kill backward compatibility with older Perl distros).

But, I digress....

This entry is just my way of committing myself to a Perl 6 learning effort:

I have written 2 Mumble compatible chat/VoIP servers: One in Erlang and one in Lua(JIT). (I attempted one in Clojure but Java based networking made it nearly impossible to do sanely.)